Katrina catastrophe has strong effect on African-Americans

Published: Friday, September 09, 2005

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) - To African-Americans, Hurricane Katrina has become a generation-defining catastrophe - a disaster with a predominantly black toll, tinged with racism. They've rallied to the cause with an unprecedented outpouring of activism and generosity.

The unlikely alliance touched by the disaster is not only donating money but gathering supplies, taking in friends and relatives, even heading south to help shoulder the burden of their people.

"You'd have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way," said Darnell M. Hunt, a sociologist and head of the African American studies department at UCLA.

Associated Press

Leonard Thomas, 23, cries after a SWAT team burst into the flooded home he and his family were living in on Monday in New Orleans, La.

Katrina's searing images - linking nature's wrath and the nation's wrongs - have fanned the smoldering resentments of the civil rights, Reaganomic and hip-hop eras all at once.

"Something about this is making people remember their own personal injustices," said author damali ayo, whose book "How to Rent a Negro" takes a satirical look at race relations.

"You don't look at Rodney King and say, 'I remember when I got beat up.' But people remember being neglected, unimportant, overlooked, thought of as 'less than.' That's a very common experience for black people."

Some 71 percent of blacks say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in America, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 6-7 among 1,000 Americans; 56 percent of whites feel this was not a particularly important lesson.

And while 66 percent of blacks think the government's response would have been faster if most of the victims had been white, 77 percent of whites disagreed.

Many events have transfixed African-Americans: the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson cases, the killings of icons from Martin Luther King Jr. to Tupac Shakur, the crack cocaine epidemic, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

But Katrina is different. It has opened people's eyes - "The face, the cover has been pulled off the invisible poor," said Rev. Ronald E. Braxton of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. - and it has created a rare opportunity for people of all backgrounds to make a tangible, immediate difference.